a cosmological pedestrian

Tag: KDE

Last year I discovered Mozilla Weave (now Sync). Weave is a Firefox addon and they offer the server components to install your own weave server. It offers everything I would like to have for PIM. So lets start with some details…

The Firefox Sync addon synchronizes the following things between your browsers/computers:

bookmarks

history

forms

prefs

tabs

passwords

The data stored on the weave server should be as private, and as safe, as data on your personal computer or device so they get encrypted on the client by a password only the user knows. So a server operator can’t read the information or disclose them.
The bookmarks are translated into a json format and added as a part to the weave json format. This is encrypted and the encrypted data is sent to the server. You can find more information about the storage format here.

On a second machine you configure the Firefox addon too. You select the synchronization profile (merge this data with my sync data, replace all data with my sync data, replace all other computers data with this data), enter your password for the encrypted data and start the synchronization. The data is downloaded and the sync engine synchronizes everything ins the json format and then translates it to the data store of firefox. I was really astonished how perfect this works.

And exactly this is what I miss for my PIM data! I would like to have my calender and addressbook in weave. This way it would be stored safely on my server. As soon as my machine has a connection to the weave server it should be synchronized or merged together.

Yesterday I’ve visited the Tokamak4 Sprint. I’ve attended the talks in the evening and then had dinner with some KDE hackers. Today I’ve looked at PlanetKDE and saw the KDE bluetooth screencast from Alex Fiestas. I liked the screencasts in the KDE 4.4 announcement, it should the users what’s cool and new. Yesterday I’ve heard the first time about activities in KDE4. I wondered what Aaron is talking about.

Here comes the conclusion:

We need a Featurecast section on the KDE website with screencasts that shows all the cool hidden stuff!

This should be the first thing a user finds on the KDE website. The user normally hasn’t installed KDE at all or doesn’t have the latest version. So the first thing should be something which shows what you can do with it and how cool this stuff is.

openSUSE has backported the new kio_sftp implementation based on libssh to their KDE 4.3 packages. This increased the users and helped to find some bugs in kio_sftp and KDE. The current implementation is working fairly well.

As soon as libssh 0.4 will be released (hopefully soon) I will add more features. Users asked for ~/.ssh/config support and I’ve added openssh’s statvfs extension to libssh. This means I can check if there is enough space on the server before I copy a file.

I’ve commited my kio_sftp rewrite to KDE trunk today. The patch for KDE 4.3 if you want to test it is available here. You need libssh 0.3.2 to get it working but I suggest to use the libssh v0-3 git branch which has fixes found by kio_sftp testers. Thanks to all of them!

The openSUSE Hackweek is over and I have a working kio_sftp implementation using libssh. There is still work which needs to be done. I have to cleanup the code and test all the features (resume of files, recursive deletion). Today I’ve copied successfully the first files to my webserver!

I’ve uploaded the two files to my webspace, here. Remeber that it’s not finished yet! You need libssh’s v0-3 git branch to get it working. I’ve found serveral bugs during the week. I will release libssh 0.3.2 next week.

Thanks to Dirk Müller who answered all my question and helped me with the KDE stuff.

I’ve got the fingerprint verification and authentication with public key and keyboard interactive working. There is still a dialog missing for special interactive questions, but the normal user stuff works just fine.

I wanted to reimplement kio_sftp with libssh since some month. This week is another openSUSE Hack Week. I’m in the SUSE office in Nürnberg with some KDE developers. Dirk Müller helps me with the implementation. I’m normally not a C++ developer so it is a good oppurtunity to get help and things done. More on Wednesday. The weather will be good tommorow so I plan to go climbing.

I’ve used my notebook the first time with openSUSE 11.1 without a power cable attached and wondered why my battery was empty after a short time. So I’ve did some research and found a knotify4 bug, this leads to a phonon and xine bug. I have the latest version of xine installed and the wakeup bug in xine is already fixed sine 1.1.9. So there must be still a bug in the phonen backend of KDE 4.1.3.

I found a new phonon-xine backend on kde-apps.org, here. I’ve found packages in the build service (click) and tested them. The wakeups of the whole system dropped to less than 200 wakeups per second.

During my research I stumbled over a amarok problem too. If you’re playing music with amarok, it produces more than 900 wakeups, even if you stopped playing the music. The whole system should need more than 500 wakeups if you play music and browse the internet.
You have to quit the application!

UPDATE:
The bugs are fixed in KDE SVN (KDE 4.2). Thanks to Mark Kretschmann. The amarok bug for this was #177517.